Who are we at war with? Everybody!
Where are we at war with them? Everywhere!
When are we at war with them? Every day!
Why are we at war with them? Everything!
The lack of anticipation of blowback is, as always, quaint.

Why are these days so many in the GOP liars? For yet another sad example see “How Newt’s New Novel Plays Politics With the Past“, Kevin M. Levin, The Atlantic, 5 December 2011 — “Eager to court black voters while retaining southern conservatives, Gingrich writes a notorious massacre out of his book”

26 thoughts on “Question time on the FM website – chapter 15”

I don’t think so. FM refers to these being things like tsunamis, meteor strikes,
Plagues of various sorts, and so on. Rare events but easily identified as important while they are occurring. Taleb’s Black Swans on the other hand represent events which, while they are occurring, are not necessarily even identified at the time as being cataclysmic as their defining characteristic is their extreme separation from our regular cognitive frame work. Systemic collapse often has this type of genesis and only after the fact historians and experts note that those involved failed to imagine the true nature of their predicament until it was too late. Thus Black Swan describes a cognitive failure to imagine certain possibilities a priori

Of course it will be resolved. Not everything moves like a TV sitcom, a tidy finish in 30 minutes. The people of Europe have to decide which path to travel. Such decisions by large numbers of people are not made easily. Nor made quickly

How does past US industrial policy compare to now in terms of coherency and competence? Can we return to success on the level of Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures” (December 1791) or the American System {See Wikipedia}?

Alexander Hamilton’s industrial policy — followed in a sense until WWII — was designed to build America’s economic strength. It benefited powerful special interests, who supported it — but provided benefits to the nation.

I remember author John Ralston Saul talking about how French enlightenment philosophers would describe England in glowing terms “The land where people think free, wise and rational thoughts”, in spite of the fact that they knew the denizens of Perfidious Albion’s thoughts were anything but, as a way of spurring change in France.

I’ve noticed you refer quite a bit to the values of the past in your blog. Do you ever find yourself tempted to gloss over the realities of the past, in order to present a better story for the present?

“Do you ever find yourself tempted to gloss over the realities of the past, in order to present a better story for the present?”

No. The opposite is the case. One of the great themes of the FM website is that one cause of our weakness is that we’ve lost our actual past. Instead we’ve constucted a faux past, erasing much of the shameful events about the slaves and Indians. History forms a foundation for a people, the base for action — and from which we see the present. A fake past throws us off balance and distorts our vision.

What do you think of the idea of a tiered system within the European Union would work? The commission would order countries with fertile land and poor economies—Italy, Spain, and Greece—to educate the unemployed masses as farmers. The poor countries grow food for the richer countries, who in turn develop the researchers and high-end service workers.

Politics is not the process of choosing among all the possible alternatives. There are a thousand and one possible paths Europe could take. Most are not practical or desirable.

The situation you describe has a zero probability, and zero logic in its favor. There is no reason the people of Spain, for example, need be serfs growing food for Germany. Nor could agriculture absorb more than a tiny fraction of its population, unless done by pre-modern methods — with Spain in deep povery.

Why have the protests in Athens stopped ?
Everyone is happy with an undemocratic austerity government /everyone understands high finance and has perfect faith in the Merkosky gamble / the gov have put bromide in the tapwater /the police are too scary / its too cold / playing the new Call Of Duty instead / they have burnt the whole of Athens and the news has been censored.
A black swan : the US military in Europe most of us forgot we got .

The protests have stopped, for a time. That does not mean that they have ended.

My guess: the Greek people protest, but at a relatively low level and in a episodic fashion — because they know these protests are futile. Greece is broke. No political leader has magic policies to change that.

In a better world the Greek people would protest for policies to share the coming pain, put Greece on a long-term course to prosperity, and out of this shock reform their society. In the real world the protests are peasant protests, ignorant venting of anger against the social machinery.

What do you think of Dmitry Orlov’s claim that the European sovereign debt crisis will finally put an end to our current civilization? “Stages of Collapse Revised: Joined at the Wallet”, 30 October 2011. Dmitry Orlov was an witness to the collapse of a previous civilization, the Soviet Union, and witnessed how that collapsed killed millions of soviet citizens. Is the same in store for us?

I strongly believe that you will never recover the five minutes you wasted reading that article. It’s too dumb for comment.

Millions were “witness to the collapse of the Soviet Union.” That gives them no special insight into the fate of the US. Certainly it gave Orlov no insights. (see Orlov’s Wikipedia entry)

Doomsters are with us, like singers, prophets, and other entertainers. All are fun, so long as not taken too seriously.

Booms and busts — even depressions — are an inherent part of free-market systems. Policy errors exaggerate these cycles. There is nothing in these cycles that “ends civilization.”

The belief that an economic down cycle might continue until civilization ends is somewhat similar to that of early men watching the days shorten during winter. What if the days shorten until endless night comes? Hence celebrations at the winter solstice.

The collapse of complex human societies remains poorly understood and current theories fail to model important features of historical examples of collapse. Relationships among resources, capital, waste, and production form the basis for an ecological model of collapse in which production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital. Societies facing such crises after having depleted essential resources risk catabolic collapse, a self-reinforcing cycle of contraction converting most capital to waste. This model allows key features of historical examples of collapse to be accounted for, and suggests parallels between successional processes in nonhuman ecosystems and collapse phenomena in human societies.

Judging something by its abstract is difficult and prone to error. They’re too brief. But life is too short to read articles unless they seem to offer promise of useful insights or data.

Greer’s article might be a work of genius. But it looks to me like gibberish. How many civilizations collapsed from depletion of resources? Climate change, war, internal social decay and instability — those are the commonplaces of history. Climate change is a frequent killer of civilizatons, as pre-modern technology provided few means to adapt.

How is one’s OODA loop affected if the opponent is irrational? Suppose he is irrational but you don’t know that. Or, put another way, does an OODA loop framework require rational action by both competitors?